Initially this criticism was directed at
RCUK’s stated preference for gold OA, which universities feared would have
significant cost implications for them. In response, RCUK offered to provide additional funding to pay for gold OA, and agreed that green OA can be used instead of
gold (although RCUK continues to stress that it “prefers” gold).

At the same time, however, the funder doubled
the permissible embargo period for green OA to 12 months for STM journals and
24 months for HSS journals. This sparked a second round of criticism, with OA advocates complaining that RCUK had succumbed to publisher lobbying. The
lengthened embargoes, they argued, would encourage those publishers without an
embargo to introduce one, and those who already had an embargo to lengthen it.

There was logic in the criticism, since
one rational response to the adjusted RCUK policy that profit-hungry publishers
would be likely to make would be to seek to dissuade authors from embracing
green OA (by imposing a long embargo before papers could be made freely
available), while encouraging them to pick up the money RCUK had put on the
table and pay to publish their papers gold OA instead (which would provide
publishers with additional revenues).

It was therefore no great
surprise when, in April 2013, Emerald Group Publishing — which until then had not had a green embargo
— introduced one. Nor was it a surprise that it settled on the maximum
permitted period allowed by RCUK of 24 months.

It was likewise no surprise
that Emerald’s move also attracted criticism, not just from OA advocates but (in May of that year) from members of the House of Commons
Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee, which was at the time
conducting an inquiry into
open access.

When taking evidence from the then
Minister of State for Universities and Science David Willetts, for instance,
the MP for Northampton South Brian
Binley said “We have received recent
reports of a major British publisher revising its open access policy to require
embargoes of 24 months, where previously it had required immediate unembargoed
deposit in a repository.” Binley went on to ask if Willetts could therefore please
have someone contact the publisher and investigate the matter.

At the time I also contacted Emerald. I wanted to
know the precise details of its new policy and to establish who would be impacted
by it. This proved a little difficult, but it turned out that Emerald had introduced a “deposit
without embargo if you wish, but not if you must” policy — an approach pioneered by
Elsevier in 2011, but which it recently abandoned.

While the wording of the
Emerald policy may have changed a little since it was introduced, at the time of
writing it appeared to be the same in substance: authors are told that they can
post the pre-print or post-print version of any article they have submitted to
an Emerald journal onto their personal website or institutional repository “with
no payment or embargo period” — unless
the author is subject to an OA mandate, in which case a 24 month embargo
applies.